There are several ways a community benefits from higher education, some you might already know, but many you probably won’t.
Higher education pays, and that’s the message which many education authorities are trying to get across, rather than focusing on the COST of higher education, we should be thinking about the BENEFITS, to the individual and also to the community.
According to findings by Collegeboard in 2007, there are many different ways how a community benefits from higher education. These are what they discovered.
- A typical college graduate who works full time will pay approximately 134% more in federal taxes and up to 80% more in total federal, local and state taxes than the typical graduate of high school.
- College graduates are much more likely to donate blood.
- Adults with a higher level of education are more likely to vote, spanning all age groups.
- Workers who do not have a higher level of education are more likely to earn a better salary in the same metropolitan area as more educated workers.
- College graduates are less likely to be unemployed, live in poverty level housing or rely on state hand outs than individuals with lower levels of education.
- Amongst the ethnic/racial groups, there is a lower unemployment rate for college graduates than for high school graduates.
Higher Education Benefits for Individuals
Now, we’ve looked at the community benefits of having a more highly educated workforce, but let’s face it, communities are people, and people are individuals, and there are great individual benefits for taking higher education, not least to say, financially.
Here are a few statistics, taken again from the Collegeboard study in 2007.
- Higher education = higher earning power – no surprises there. During the course of his working life, a full time worker with a four year college degree earns more than 60% more than a worker who only has a high school diploma.
- If you have a Master’s degree you can expect to earn double, and a professional degree will treble your salary compared to a high school graduate over your working life.
- Even if you go to college but never actually finish your degree, the chances are that you’ll earn 19% more than workers who never actually went to college.
- It takes a typical college graduate, (who enrolled at 18 and then studied for four years) 11 years to ‘catch up’ and compensate, not only for paying the full tuition fees at college but also to make up any potential earnings lost through the time spent studying.
- If you have a college education you are more likely to be offered a pension plan, and you are more likely to say ‘yes’.